New Research Will Benefit Four Million Americans Suffering from Chronic Fatigu...(y disease progression biomarkersincludin...),Health

-- Kathleen Light, PhD, of the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, who will investigate the mechanisms involved in chronic pain that afflicts 40%-70% of CFS patients. This study will determine whether receptors located on blood cells are increased and overactive in people with CFS and associated with increased pain sensitivity. Light theorizes that increases in specific receptors following exercise may be blood-based biomarkers for CFS and could lead to a medical test to identify CFS patients.

-- Marvin Medow, PhD, of New York Medical College, who will investigate how orthostatic intolerance, seen in many CFS patients, affects brain function. This study will examine if CFS patients have increased pooling of blood in the abdomen that results in reduced cerebral blood flow. Medow will also investigate physiologic and oxidative stress changes associated with disturbance in blood flow. These results will help determine if alterations in blood flow affect brain metabolism.

-- Bhubaneswar Mishra, PhD, of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, who will use state-of-the-art bioinformatics and computational biology tools to create a computational model of CFS-a kind of "Google for CFS" that will be part database, part knowledge-base, part research network. This new resource will provide a "systems view" of CFS that accumulates published CFS literature and experimental data to disentangle complex relationships among reported findings and discover causes of CFS.

-- Sanjay Shukla, PhD, of Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, who will use metagenomics to determine if the ratio of good to bad intestinal bacteria in CFS patients is altered, and whether this imbalance in gut bacteria may be responsible for triggering CFS symptoms. Recent advances in metagenomics have
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